What the ringing is, and is not

You hear a sound nobody else can hear. A ring, a hiss, a hum, a whistle, sometimes more than one. It was there when you woke, it is there now, and it is loudest in the quiet. This course is six lessons about living alongside it so that it stops running your day. It starts with what it is.

A common thing

The word is tinnitus, and it is very common. A large share of adults have it at some point; for many it is occasional, for some it is constant. It most often goes with some hearing change, from age, from noise, from an ear infection or a blocked ear, from certain medicines, from stress or a jaw problem. Often no single cause is found. That is frustrating and it is also usual.

The sound itself is not generated in the ear in the way a noise is. It is the hearing parts of the brain turning up their gain when the signal from the ear changes, a bit like static on a radio when the station is weak. That matters, because it means the sound is partly about attention, and attention can be worked with.

First, get it checked

Before anything in this course, see someone. New ringing, ringing in one ear only, ringing that pulses with your heartbeat, ringing with sudden hearing loss, dizziness, pain or discharge: these need an audiologist or an ear, nose and throat doctor soon, and in the case of sudden hearing loss, the same day. Most of the time the check finds nothing dangerous. The check is still the first step, because once you know, the fear has less to feed on.

An audiologist can also test your hearing, which is worth knowing even if it is fine, and talk to you about hearing aids if it is not. For many people with hearing loss, aids quieten the ringing more than anything else does.

What this course does not do

It does not cure tinnitus. Nothing reliably does, and anything that promises to is selling something. What it does is change your relationship with the sound: how much of your attention it takes, how much it frightens you, how much it keeps you awake. People who do this kind of work often say, months later, that the sound is still there and they mostly do not notice it. That is called habituation, and it is the aim.

What you will do

Over six lessons you will learn why the ringing gets louder in the quiet and what that tells you; how to put gentle sound around you so it is never the only thing to hear; how to catch the thoughts that make it frightening and check them against what is true; how to get to sleep with it; and how to keep going when it flares, because it will.

The practice

For a week, keep a two-line note each evening: how loud the ringing felt today out of ten, and how much it bothered you out of ten. Two different numbers. Most people find, after a week, that the second moves around far more than the first. That gap is where this course works.

This week

If you have not had the ringing checked, book that first. Keep the two numbers each evening. Change nothing else yet.